


Reach Out and Touch Faith

by objectlesson



Category: Lana Del Rey (Musician), Marina & the Diamonds
Genre: F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Kissing, Religion, Religious Conflict, Religious Guilt, Romance, Self-Discovery, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-02-07 11:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21457651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: She swallows, and her heart pounds, and Lana crawls up between her thighs slow and coy until the bitterness of wine and the sweetness of her lipgloss is everywhere. “Ready?” she asks. “Close your eyes.”Marina is not ready, but she closes her eyes anyway and thinksElizabeth, Lizzy, Lanaall at once, like an incantation, like a liturgical prayer.
Relationships: Lana Del Rey/Marina Diamandis
Comments: 14
Kudos: 41





	Reach Out and Touch Faith

**Author's Note:**

> This originally was written as a short drabble, and I expanded on it a little. There are mentions of girls kissing/performing for boys entertainment, and also mentions of past het sex in this, just fyi! also lots of religious shit and angst, but overall I think it's got a sweet/feel good vibe. enjoy!

Elizabeth Grant goes by Lizzy before she goes by Lana.

Marina watches and tracks every transformation: the shift from an awkward freshman with skinned knees and chubby cheeks to a waifish sophomore with sad eyes and too much mascara and bleached hair to the elegant junior she is now. A benevolent beauty queen, swaying hips, batting lashes. The sort of body boys look at, the sort of smile they look away from, so that they can sneer knowingly to their rowing buddies. _This girl easy_ they think. _She’s a slut. _

They think the same thing about Marina, because she has the biggest tits at Sacred Heart Academy. So even though she does not know her, (and is maybe a little bit jealous of her) Marina carries a sort of sympathy in her heart for Elizabeth turned Lizzy turned Lana. A solidarity, a silent knowing. A curiosity, at the very least.

That curiosity is sated one Wednesday when Marina is trying to sneak off in the middle of mass for a smoke. She knows the secret shortcut through the theater department’s greenroom, which is downstairs in the basement past the bathroom, so under the guise of having to pee, she slips out. She cups her palm around her pack of cigarettes hidden in the lining of her uniform blazer, private and promising, and as soon as she pads down the stairs and turns the corner, she realizes she’s not alone. 

“Oh my god,” she gasps, hand ripping from her blazer to spread wide over the thud of her heart. “You scared me.” 

“Did you think I was a ghost?” Lana asks, grinning at her. She somehow looks pretty in the too-long plaid skirt and knee-high knit socks they have to wear on days when there’s a mass, and Marina would normally resent that, but she’s too lost in the way Lana’s eyes are glittering conspiratorially now to think of it, too fixed on the twisted curve of her coy, sweet half smile. 

“I thought you were a nun,” she snorts through a laugh. “Sister Agatha hiding in the halls, waiting for me to come running by so she could slap my hand for smoking. She _knows_ I always try and ditch mass.”

“You have cigs?” Lana asks, raising an eyebrow. “I was looking for the communion wine,” she adds slyly, teaching out her hand like she expects Marina to take it. 

Something hot and confusing jolts through Marina; something like longing. It’s perhaps the culmination of everything she felt she missed out on all though elementary school: being invited to cool-girls birthday parties, missing soccer practice because she had confirmation class, having to hem her skirts extra long because her mom would never allow her to go to school with her knees showing. Elizabeth turned Lizzy turned Lana, with her ever changing mask of mystery, wants to break the rules with her, and that feels almost like _belonging_. Marina has never felt that before. 

So she takes her hand with held breath, and their fingers tangle. “C’mon,” Lana says, squeezing her. “Let’s have a party.” 

When they find the wine, they can’t stop the muffled gales of laughter. “It’s _Franzia_,” Marina cackles, popping the plastic seal on one of at least twenty five boxes hidden away in storage. “Jesus’s blood—it’s _boxed garbage. _How sacrilegious. How _cheap._” 

Lana stifles her giggle with her palm, sitting on the basement floor beside Marina, writhing so her plaid uniform skirt rides up her soft, creamy thighs. Marina stares, and wants to touch, but does not _want_ to want to touch, so she sucks some of the wine down to quell her urges. It tastes like cardboard and bitterness in her mouth, and she winces. “God,” Lana says, shaking her head. “Look at you. Chugging it right from box. Here, gimme. I’ll show you how to do it right. I’m an expert on pilfered communion wine.” 

She rips open the box with french-manicured nails, revealing the plastic bag inside. Then she pulls it out, and it looks like a sheep’s bladder filled with blood, like one of the many awful dishes Marina was forced to eat the one winter she went back to Wales to visit her family for the holidays. It’s pretty in Lana’s hands, though. Or Maybe Lana’s hands are pretty. 

She sits the bag on her shoulder, twists the spout to her pretty lips, and sucks some out. “See?” she says, swallowing with a grimace and stoppering it up again. “Like a bagpipe. Or a camel pack…or whatever those are called.” 

“You really are a pro,” Marina says, impressed. She fishes her cigarettes and zippo out from the lining in her jacket and empties one out into her palm. Lana cups her hands around the butt to help her light it, and as she leans close Marina can smell her perfume, her lotion, her shampoo, _something. _It makes her stomach plummet, and she wonders what the fuck is wrong with her that she’s so desperate for a friend that the second a girl her age pays attention to her, her hands shake. “You want a drag?” she asks Lana, pinching the cigarette to still her quaking. 

Lana nods, takes it, presses her lips to the filter and sucks. There’s a shimmery lip gloss print on the paper when she hands it back, and Marina tastes the sweetness when she kisses the pink smudge to inhale. “I _am_ really good at being a bad girl,” Lana says easily then, blowing a smoke ring presumably to show off. It should annoy Marina, but instead it leaves her breathless, tight-stomached. She reaches up, puts her fingers through the hole to dissipate the O’s tight neatness. “What about you? Any _unholiness_ under your belt? Any church basement romances?” she says, batting her lashes at Marina just like Marina imagines she bats her lashes at boys. _This girl is easy_ she thinks for some reason, sharp and invasive and hot in her chest. _She’s a slut._

It doesn’t feel _good, _to think that, so she silences it. And in that silencing, she realizes that what she means is _I wonder if this girl is easy. _Followed by the even more troublesome thought,_ she’s hot. _This is not the first time Marina has thought a girl is hot before, but every time it happens she convinced herself it’s something else. Not pure appreciation, not _attraction, _but jealousy. Admiration laced with envy. Not _she’s hot_ but _she’s hotter than me. _She swallows, and confesses. 

_“_No, just a smoking habit, cheating on chemistry tests, sneaking out at night to see concerts and stuff. Garden variety sin, I guess,” she admits, blowing her own smoke into the remnants of Lana’s. The mingle, twisting together like dragons. “A blowjob at Christmas mass, one time. Not in the basement, but in the parking lot. Next to a dumpster. Very romantic.” 

There’s a moment of them sitting there together, Lana smoking and drinking, Marina watching and wondering why she’s got to make everything fucking _weird. _But then Lana makes things _weirder. _

“This is way more romantic,” she drawls, sipping more wine from the bag, making it look sexy and easy and _luxurious, _somehow. She flips her shiny brown hair from one shoulder to another, and Marina remembers when her hair was shoulder length and thin and breaking and bottle blonde, only a few years ago. Lana seems so different now, a different girl, a different name. Like she just shed her skin like a lizard, broke free from her chrysalis like a butterfly. Rolled a stone aside with magic and appeared alive three days later after having been crucified. She looks fucking _holy_, right now, taking the cigarette right out of Marina’s hand and inhaling from it, eyes locked on her, even as the smoke spreads in tendrils between them. “ Have you ever kissed a girl?” she asks then, and Marina feels like the world is collapsing in on itself, a black hole, an imploding star, quicksand. 

“No,” she answers automatically, even if it’s a lie. She’s fake-kissed girls before, at parties when boys were watching, spread her mouth wide and sealed her lips and pretended to lash tongues to impress. It had felt scary and gross, at the time, and then it had been a relief, because she hated it so she didn’t have to press on her confusing feelings about girls.

But now she’s realizing in stark, terrifying, smoke-and-Franzia doused clarity that maybe it _wasn’t_ the fake-kissing part that made it gross, maybe it was the boy watching. Maybe it was the farce, the audience. Because here, in the basement drinking cheap wine with Elizabeth turned Lizzy turned Lana, she’s thinking of kissing her. Not faking it, but for _real, _and the mere _thought_ twists up hot and excited in her stomach. Her lips would be soft, sticky with gloss. She’d taste like communion. 

Lana's mouth curls into a smile. “Want me to pop your cherry?” she asks then, sweetly, gently, softly. 

Marina cannot speak, so she just puts her cigarette out on the concrete floor and nods, and watches Lana’s smile widen, catlike and wine-stained. She hefts the bag off her shoulder and to the dusty basement floor, gets up on her hands and knees with her back arched so her skirt rides up, revealing threadbare bike shorts and Marina imagines the way they’d feel under her fingers, the way they might smell if she were to press her face into the crotch of them and inhale, how she sometimes does to her own underwear after gym-class, testing self-consciously if she smells. She swallows, and her heart pounds, and Lana crawls up between her thighs slow and coy until the bitterness of wine and the sweetness of her lipgloss is everywhere. “Ready?” she asks. “Close your eyes.” 

Marina is not ready, but she closes her eyes anyway and thinks _Elizabeth, Lizzy, Lana _all at once, like an incantation, like a liturgical prayer. _Take me so easy,_ she thinks. _I’m a slut. _

The kiss comes slow, like molasses dropping from a tea-spoon. In her experience, boys lead tongue first, but Lana presses her lips into Marina’s one, two, _three_ times with a barely parted mouth before she uses her tongue at all, each kiss lingering and tender, their breath labored and nervous and audible around them. It’s so slow Marina is _aching_ for more, so when it finally happens she gasps, heart leaping at the way Lana’s tongue flicks out, honey-sweet and so, _so_ fucking slick she can’t help but think reflexively about the way the flood feels between her legs when she touches herself at night. 

Time stops, or slows down, or speeds up, or disintegrates. Marina doesn’t know. She knows that this is better than kissing boys, that this is better than kissing girls _for_ boys. This is better than anything she’s ever done. Lana’s hair is soft as she reaches up and tucks it behind her ear, giggling into her mouth as they kiss, and_ kiss._

“Your heart is pounding,” Lana whispers, brushing her fingers down the crisp, school-crest embroidered pocket of Marina’s oxford shirt. 

“Yeah, well. You’re good at this,” Marina admits, squirming on the floor, knowing there’s dust on her skirt, that she will have to brush it off before they sneak back into the auditorium, lest the whole school know she was down here stealing wine and kisses from Lana Grant. IShe wonders if the rest of the school is chanting above them, if the priest is singing, if he’s offering sips of Franzia to the congregation and murmuring, _maybe the lord be with you. _

Lana grins, kisses her, then pulls back to sit on her own heels. Marina is disappointed they’re not making out anymore, and realizes with a jolt in her chest she would have been willing to take it further, push blindly into unknown territory. She wanted Lana to _touch_ her, to trace the lace hems of her bra, to push her skirt up her thighs. She wanted to feel Lana’s skin in return, sneak curious hands into her blazer pockets. She wasn’t thinking about rules, or sins, or _anything, _really, except how good it felt. To tell the truth. 

“I told you. M’sort of a pro at this stuff,” Lana reminds her. 

“At kissing girls?” Marina asks, wondering if they are the _same, _somehow. She used to think the way she saw other girls was normal, that _all_ girls did it. But then, she realized after enough conversations and close observations, that she was _different. _Her friends didn’t feel terrified of the window displays at Victoria’s Secret, they _didn’t _change for gym in the bathroom stalls to keep themselves from looking. That was just her. And maybe, _maybe_, Lana. 

“At lots of things,” Lana says, shrugging. “Blowing smoke rings, stealing booze.” Her eyebrows arch elegantly, something sly curling up the corner of her mouth. “Church basement romances.” 

And this time, when they kiss, Marina is the one who starts it. She swallows, brave and determined, and pitches forward to seal their mouths, like this is a ritual, a secret, magical rite. Lana closes her eyes just in time like she _knew_ it was coming, and Marina licks her smile, gasps into the heat of it, smoothes trembling fingers up the inside of Lana’s arm, too scared to touch her anywhere else, even if she _wants to. _Concretely and certainly, she _wants_ to. 

It feels like the sky is opening up to allow beams of light to fall through, it feels like a stone being rolled away. It feels like waking up after having been dead. It feels like absolution, and it scares her, so she breaks away, breathless. 

“What, um,” she murmurs, panting as Lana gazes at her with twinkling eyes. Her lips are swollen, but otherwise she’s unscathed. “What are we doing this for?” 

She wants an _answer, _a confession. _Do you like me? _she thinks desperately. _ Do you think I'm pretty? Or is this practice? Do all the other girls kiss each other _just_ for guys, or is there anyone, _any_one like me? _

_“_For fun,” Lana says easily, batting her lashes again against flushed, foundation sparkling cheeks. Marina stares, and doesn’t know what that means. Before she can ask they hear the organ sounding above them, an eerie vibration rattling the walls and they look up, still tangled together, Marina’s terrified hand pressed to Lana’s wrist, where she can feel her pulse. “We should get back,” Lana says then, pulling away. 

She stands and holds out her hand, pulling Marina to her feet after her. Then she bends over to the Franzia bag up into her backpack. She winks when she notices Marina is watching. “For later,” she explains. Then, as they brush the dust off their skirts and Marina’s heart races with confusion, with _revelation_, Lana says, “we should hang out sometime.” 

“We just _did_ hang out,” Marina mumbles.

_“I mean _we should hang out _again_. I’ve always…I’ve wanted to for a long time,” Lana says then, shouldering her backpack. “You just. I guess you seemed different from the other girls, in a good way. Even from afar. I’d see you and think, I wish we were friends.” 

Marina’s not sure why, but her eyes well up so suddenly. They sting, and she feels _scared, _and exposed, like Lana has been seeing through her uniform and to the scarred skin underneath _all_ this time, without her knowing. But at the same time it terrifies her, she _likes_ it. She _wants_ Lana to see her. She wants to be seen. 

She smiles, feeling her cheeks color. “Well, we _are_ friends, now.” 

“Good,” Lana says, sounding relieved. 

They walk side by side up the stairs to the greenroom, and Marina’s heart pounds in elation. She steals glances at Lana from the corner of her eyes and _still, _even without a bag of Franzia on her shoulder and rings of smoke pushed from sweet, puffy lips, she looks holy. 


End file.
